The other night, I received a phone call from
Matthew Picton, "Fancy a few Steve?" he asked with his irresistible English chirp. I was initially reluctant to give up a night in the studio, but I hadn't seen Matthew for months, so I tucked 20 drawings under my arm and sauntered over to the
Black Sheep Pub. The place seemed bursting with rookies.
"What's going on?" I asked.
"Tis Saint Patties Day Steve. . . didin ya know?" Matthew replied.
I kept my drawings under my arm for a pilsner and then we ambled over to Martino's where we scored a big booth. Matthew ordered a round of Stellas and spread all the drawings out on the table. Then he shuffled and stacked them in ways that made sense to him.
"I don't fancy these," Matthew said as he handed me five drawings. "But these," he continued, "you must show to Richard Heller in Los Angeles. . . very nice gallery that one, he'd show these in a second. I reckon you should fly down there this weekend. There's a special you see, $210 round trip."
Two pints later and the small town regulars were slapping shoulders and the coked-out chicks (with their clothes which seemed to hover around their skeletal bodies like leafy asteroids) ask non-stop questions and never listen to the answers. I keep my drawings tight on my lap. We decide that it is time to move on.
A block over,
Tabu turns out to be my favorite spot of the night. I don't feel like I'm in America when I'm there. We are the minority language, race, and interest in salsa dancing. I love watching good dancers. Coronas were two bucks! The witching hour snuck-up on me right when Eric, who owns
Rogue Design Group, showed up with
Marga. I had never met Marga but she spent an unnatural amount of time looking at my drawings. One by one, she leafed through the stack. . .
twice! She gave each drawing a visceral emotive label. It was all very indulgent and flattering. . . did I mention the Coronas were only two bucks?
A couple of days later, Marga e-mails me after visiting this blog (I had given her my card) and she asks me an important question: "Why are you doing this latest collection in small format? Why not about five times that size?" Now, in this go-go world, I can't wait for Three's anymore, triangulation is too obvious, I find meaning when
pairs of things happen. In my next e-mail was this from
Dennis, "I can relate to your inky ways lately... one question: have you any thoughts about scaling up?"
So thus begins my answer (take a potty break if you must).
First, I'm going to have to repeat myself and lay some ground work. Also, I must answer
Matthew Landkammer's question from the previous post "Can you define what you mean by "pure" abstraction?" and even before that I have to comment on Marga's cheeky " darkness is way over-rated".
Lightness and Darkness are woven together in an inseparable relationship and I did not mean that I Love Light at the expense of Dark. Rather, I love what Light
does. I love how it creates space. Remember my
Picton Points post from last year? I'll repost a portion:
Take
and assume (for the sake of the discussion), that the point has some minuscule mass or volume.
Now move the point through space, or through time, or shine a light on it to create a shadow.
The shadow is
The movement traced is a line. Now move the line, or cast it's shadow.
The next dimensional step is
Move the plane
Then we have
To me, pure abstraction is empty. No space can be seen. No overlap, no perspective, no gradient values or hues, nothing. Not a hint of light causing shadow. Pure color can be unfettered to the human impulse to make order, or to see faces.
Jacques taught me the cool word
Pareidolia , "first used in 1994 by Steven Goldstein, describes a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being mistakenly perceived as recognizable." So, for me, Ad Reinhardt was peerless as a pure abstract painter.
I'm almost certain that he called his black paintings "the last vestige of brightness". I
am positive Ad Reinhadt wrote this:
LIGHT? Harsh, soft, reflected, absorbed, transparent light? Soft lights, sweet music, sweeter unheard music?
Frozen-music architecture? Gothic-Greek light?
Twilight-light, twilight-time, twilight space?
Broken, baroque, dissolved light?
Iridescence, evanescence, transcendence light? Luminous-numinous? Rome-versus-East light?
Darkness, grayness, dullness light? Lightlessness.
I was in just this sort of mindset when I saw my first piece of Art. What I saw was a huge red painting, alone in a cloistered antechamber of some museum. "Big deal," I first thought, and yet, I had to admit that the red was fairly intense. I began stepping towards the painting, marveling at its immaculate surface. Was this some insanely primed canvas? Step closer. It was far to big to be some sort of seamless lumber sheet. Step closer. Where were the protective guard ropes? Step. It was beautiful. Pure Red. Step. Hypnotized and yet brazen, I reached up to touch the painting.
Huh?
It wasn't a painting. It was a hole in the wall revealing a cleverly lit room. It was as if I was sent to that moment when your chair threatens to either spill backwards or forwards, balancing in the liminal zone. I saw nothing but pure retinal color. I saw light, and it was solid. Light was life. Thanks
James Turell.
So that is "pure abstraction" for me. A blank. The moment that a mark is made however, the game changes.
The relationship between the mark and the pure abstraction of nothingness just gets more and more complicated. I know from experience that to blow something up bigger, simply to make it seem more interesting is a mistake. The relationship between the Nothing and the marks changes as the scale changes. Some say "Just use bigger tools", but the ink has its own physics and scale too. At some point, when a grain of sand is enlarged to the size of a golf ball lets say, the sand begins to have Nothing inside of it. Right now the following drawings are the scale they are because everything is perfect about them. When I go bigger, they get too complicated or too empty. Also, there is so much uncertainty about what I am doing, it is not efficient to go bigger just yet. I've only been on this path for what? two months? I need to stroll for a little longer. It gets expensive to go bigger. This scale is eco-friendly, intimate, and not macho. This scale is scan-able, portable, and sweet.
This scale allows for me to draw faster than I can think (thanks Chris).
In order to scale up, with my next paycheck, I'm going to order some Rosco Supersat black. It is a dye like color formulated to be diluted with substantial quantities of water while retaining binder strength. It works on most scenic surfaces including muslin, plastic and metal. I dries to a completely matte, non-reflective finish.
I was walking to my mural job late last night when I passed a stinky no-nonsense tavern. Not a scenester bar, mind you, but a pinball playing and beer drinking tavern. Outside stood a young, baggy panted and Elton-John-glasses-wearing girl who was flapping her arms in blissfull amazement. There was a posse of dread-locked dudes flaunting their Brookes Brothers suits. And to top it all off was an Izod kook showing a homeless busker some sloppy arpeggio. People were fearless and it seemed contagious.
The mural can only "work" from one privileged focal point (actually three, but that is for another post). As the public walks past, or through the stairwell, there are three points where the mural snaps into cohesion. A step in any direction and the perspective begins to twist in a nauseating and cubist sort of way. It occurs to me that the vanishing point is Representation's crutch. Does that mean that Abstraction was invented when perspective was introduced? Who were those cats? Giotto wasn't it?
How did we see before this was invented? Isn't it amazing that the stationary view point was something that was invented? Were we living in a soup of Abstraction before this learned way of seeing started to sink into our collective consciousness? (Anybody who has taught a class on perspective drawing and witnessed the tears can tell you that this is a learned way of seeing). Why were they called the "Dark Ages"? Weren't they, like, totally into God and stuff? Shouldn't those years of "emptiness of mind" be the "Enlightened" ones? Why is losing a fundamental connection to the big picture a Renaissance? 
How did we see before this was invented? Isn't it amazing that the stationary view point was something that was invented? Were we living in a soup of Abstraction before this learned way of seeing started to sink into our collective consciousness? (Anybody who has taught a class on perspective drawing and witnessed the tears can tell you that this is a learned way of seeing). Why were they called the "Dark Ages"? Weren't they, like, totally into God and stuff? Shouldn't those years of "emptiness of mind" be the "Enlightened" ones? Why is losing a fundamental connection to the big picture a Renaissance? 
